The Parlour Maid Who Opened Gates

In 1930, the China Inland Mission rejected Gladys Aylward. At twenty-eight, she was a London parlour maid with no formal education, and the mission board judged her incapable of learning Mandarin. The builders examined the stone and set it aside.

But Gladys saved every shilling from her wages and bought a one-way ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She traveled alone across Europe and war-torn Siberia, arriving in Yangcheng, China, with almost nothing. There, she opened an inn for muleteers, telling Bible stories each evening to roomfuls of travelers who carried her words deep into the countryside. The local mandarin appointed her the official foot inspector, sending her into villages no Western missionary had ever reached.

When Japan invaded in 1938, Gladys led over a hundred orphaned children on a harrowing twelve-day march across the mountains to safety. Starving, wounded by shrapnel, burning with fever, she collapsed upon arrival. Doctors said she should have died on the trail.

She did not die. She lived, and she spent her remaining decades proclaiming what the Lord had done.

The Psalmist sings, "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes." The mission board saw a parlour maid who could not conjugate verbs. The Almighty saw a cornerstone for His work in China. What the gatekeepers of respectability refused, God placed at the very center of His purposes. This is the Lord's doing, and it remains marvelous in our eyes.